An integrated multi-hop cellular data network

In this paper, we present an integrated Multi-hop Cellular Data Network (IMCDN) architecture, which overlays a special self-organized wireless network on an existing cellular network. The self-organized network is a multiple-layer access network that uses hierarchical-routing for upstream transmissions from mobiles. This architecture seeks to support multiple-hop data services using unused frequency resources in the cellular system. Leveraging on short-distance, line-of-sight transmissions and multiple-layer hierarchical routing, we exploit maximal spatial reuse, and load balancing, within the low-power multi-hop access network. We show that the system capacity for the multiple-hop data service within a given upstream bandwidth available to the service is many times that of a conventional one-hop cellular system.